The UCSB Pollock Theater student staff was granted red carpet press access to the 2013 Santa Barbara International Film Festival for our Script to Screen: On Location show. It was a rare opportunity for students to be able to shoot interviews with stars such as soon-to-be Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence, soon-to-be Oscar winner Ben Affleck, David O. Russell (writer/director of Silver Linings Playbook), Oscar nominated producer of Silver Linings Playbook Bruce Cohen and many more.

The students got first hand experience in the fast paced nature of red carpet interviews, having a limited amount of time to shoot them before the star moves on to the next interview. The students also learned how to block desperate, unprofessional photographers from photo-bombing our precious interviews. In the end, the interviews were successful and the students had wonderful production reels to include in their resumes.

Our student work has such a positive response from the interviewees of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, we were granted another red carpet press opportunity at the 2013 Writers Guild Awards to interview the top screenwriters of today. Also, our interviews of Jennifer Lawrence and David O. Russell led to us to getting a WGA red carpet interview with Jacki Weaver, the Oscar nominated supporting actress from Silver Linings Playbook.

Script to Screen: On Location and the Pollock Theater student staff look forward to more red carpet interviews for the upcoming 2013-2014 season.

Script to Screen interview with the cast and crew of Argo:

Script to Screen interview with the cast and crew of Silver Linings Playbook:

He proposes what can be done to freeze the the rising temperatures of the earth to only slightly warmer than pre-industrial temperatures.

Watch as Lea discusses the societal impacts of certain temperature thresholds in different climate systems that we have yet to cross. Can this be prevented? Find out in this video from the Institute for Energy Efficiency:

West of the metropolis of Tokyo lies Chichibu Tama Kai National Park, a protected area home to the sacred Mount Mitake.

This majestic mountain has been a site of Shinto worship for thousands of years and the surrounding national park is scattered with ancient shrines. At the mountains peak, there is a Shinto shrine built under Emperor Sujin in 90 B.C. which contains a statue built in 736.

From this ancient area of worship comes a special form of Kagura, sacred Japanese song and dance rituals.

In this video, the East Asia Center and East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara present the first and only US performance of Chichibu Kagura. These particular songs and dances date back the the seventeenth century.

Dexter Filkins is one of the most respected combat journalists of his generation. His 2008 book, The Forever War, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction Book and was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time and the Boston Globe. As part of a team of New York Times reporters, Filkins won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for dispatches from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In this lecture from the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UCSB, Filkins retraces the seven years he spent covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, using vivid images by some of the best photojournalists working today. Filkins’ intimate knowledge of many of the main actors – American, Iraqi and Afghan – in two of the most polarizing wars in American history, gives him a unique perspective on these contemporary conflicts.

Look at some of the research taking place at UC Santa Barbara’s Solid State Lighting and Energy Center, get a preview of what the future holds when it comes to lighting and power use and discover how Professor Nakamura’s work continues to affect the world.